summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/hurd/faq/gramatically_speaking.mdwn
blob: 7aa3edacaa38e393a795d282b10a5b4a680e12da (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
[[meta copyright="Copyright © 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008 Free Software
Foundation, Inc."]]

[[meta license="""[[toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[toggleable
id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
is included in the section entitled
[[GNU_Free_Documentation_License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]

[[meta title="Grammatically speaking, what is the Hurd?"]]

*Hurd*, as an acronym, stands for *Hird of [[Unix]]-Replacing Daemons*.  *Hird*, in
turn, stands for *Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth*.

We treat *Hurd* as a title rather than as a proper name: it requires an
article, as in *the Hurd*.  For instance: *The ext2 filesystem is provided by
the Hurd, not by Mach.*  Note that all of the following are incorrect: *Hurd*,
*HURD*, *The HURD*, and *the hurd*.

We write *the GNU Hurd* instead of *the Hurd* when we want to emphasize that
the Hurd is a GNU package.  Once this has been made clear, we usually use the
shorter form, without *GNU*.

The whole operating system includes not only the kernel and the system servers,
but also many more programs.  This system is called *GNU*, or *the GNU
operating system*.  The GNU programs can also run on other operating system
kernels.  We say *GNU/Hurd* when we want to put emphasis on the fact that this
is the GNU system running on top of the Hurd, and to contrast it with the
GNU/Linux system which is GNU using Linux as the kernel.

Finally, there is *Debian GNU/Hurd*. This refers to the distribution of the GNU
system as created by the Debian developers.  For example: *What do you run on
your laptop?  Debian GNU/Hurd, of course.*

The French generally write *le Hurd*--that is, they treat the name as masculine
singular, capitalized as in English.

When we are referring to the microkernel, we say *Mach* and use it as a proper
noun.  For example: *Mach uses the device drivers found in version 2.0.x of
Linux.*  We sometimes say *the Mach microkernel* instead of just *Mach*.